Just my two cents on this subject (and it is a subject that is of
significant interest to me, see my signature)
TAG may has established what is correct and what is not correct about meta
data in URIs, but I personally think that finding is a bit unrealistic.
Yes, if you are dealing with professional developers and IT folk, but not
with the general public. Even though technical professionals really want
the URLs to be opaque, real world people are creating URLs and real world
people are seeing and using URLs every day. The more they come in contact
with URL the more they will believe that URLs have meaning and the more they
come to rely on that meaning. As such I think it is ivory-towerish and a bit
out-of-touch to say they shouldn't rely on meaning in URLs. Saying people
shouldn't infer meaning isn't going to make them stop. This is a social
issue, not a technical one. I think it will be a lot better to try and come
up with as many ways as possible that they can metadata safely rather than
prohibit it entirely (and this is an issue I plan to address on an ongoing
basis at http://blog.welldesignedurls.org/)
It's a bit like saying the it's against the law for teenagers to drink
alcohol and having a belief that it is immoral for them to do so. There may
be a law and it may be immoral, but it's not going to stop teenagers from
drinking alcohol. Better to address the problem via other methods than just
rely on stated prohibition.
As I said, just my two cents worth.
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/http://www.welldesignedurls.org/